What can brown do for you? Start doin' your freakin' jobs!

Ok so it has been awhile since I posted on my "adventures" at UPS. When I left off, I was headed back to the sort aisle to work with a new group of sups who would eventually become some of my closest friends at UPS and outside of work. I now had almost a year of experience under my belt, including some load side experience which separated me from everyone in the unload/sort. Being that I had the second most experience, after Rob S., I realized that I had to step up and be the lead supervisor for the back. Adrian was my sort partner and P.J. was my unload partner. It was some of the most enjoyable times at UPS. Not to mention future sups/friends were working for us as sorters (Trevor & Andrew).

So anyway, my new full time supervisor, Tom, was a pretty good sup. He was always trying to keep the building running smooth even if it cost us in the back. He also wanted to end missorts. So he came up with this idea of wearing hand stamps. Basically, the sorters wore these letters on their hands, then when they picked up the package it would stamp the box. If it was a missort, we could track who sorted it. Nice...in theory.

We also had a new building manager, Dave, from Palm Springs. Dave had a red-ish tint to him, from all the sun I think. Anyways, the funny thing about Dave was that he would always talk about Palm Springs and compare it to Ontario. Now Palm Springs processed about 3-5 trailers a night versus our 15-20...yeah we bought into what he was telling us .

So part of the problem with the stamps was that when it got cold in the building, they froze. Seriously, you could put the ink on the stamps and instead of soaking into the stamp the ink would float on top and look like something from Terminator 2. The other problem was that it slowed down our sorters. Because they started to ask us to have the sorters verify that the stamp was on the box, instead of just grabbing.

So one morning, we were letting the stamps soak up the ink and we were just flowing. About 40 minutes til break we were getting calls asking about missorts and stamps. Now Tom was out of the building that day, and we were left on our own. So there wasn't much time before break and I told Adrian, former sorter turned sup, we would put them on after break.

We get a call from Dave to meet us at the time clock where the stamps were. We showed up and he looked pissed and broken. He asked us why they weren't wearing the stamps. I just said we were letting them soak and didn't go back to put them on. No excuses, we just didn't do it. I don't think he expected that response because he just got redder than usual and looked like he was going to burst. He looked at us and just went off.

"That's the problem with this building. We put things in place to fix them and you just decide not to do them. You all think you know what's right and how to fix things, but if you did then we wouldn't be so bad. Now after break you are going to put these stamps on and start doin' your freakin' jobs!"

It was a thing of beauty. He left Adrian and I looked at each other and laughed a little. That was Dave's moment for us. That quote was used over and over by Adrian and I for the next 4 years. Dave was only in the building for about 3 maybe 4 months. He couldn't adjust from such a small operation to one the size of ours.

Enter: Lou. This is where we become classic UPS.
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